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Part of the book series: Literacy Studies ((LITS,volume 8))

Abstract

In China, researchers and educators have found evidence to support that the shared-book reading approach improves Chinese children’s literacy and language skills. In order to support Chinese language teachers who want to use the shared-book approach in north America, this study is a systematic analysis of Chinese juvenile literature available in north America. In this project, we considered 1,034 titles of Chinese children’s literature books that were available to the north American community. These books were published in China, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United States. After removing the translated book portion of the collection, we analyzed five aspects of the books: genres, readability, aural accessibility, cultural content, and appeal to Chinese language learners. Overall, the books were written for Chinese-speaking children who have the oral language capacity to understand when the stories are read to them. In addition, some of the contemporary realistic fiction titles are laden with strong Chinese sentimentalism that may be foreign to students grew up overseas.

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Correspondence to Belinda Yun-Ying Louie .

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Louie, B.YY. (2014). Chinese Children’s Literature in North America. In: Chen, X., Wang, Q., Luo, Y. (eds) Reading Development and Difficulties in Monolingual and Bilingual Chinese Children. Literacy Studies, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7380-6_11

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